A major outage at internet infrastructure company Cloudflare caused widespread disruptions to thousands of websites and online services early Tuesday.
The company, which provides security and traffic management for a vast portion of the web, reported issues with its global network. The problem began around 7 a.m., with users across the globe encountering error messages and being unable to access various sites.
Affected users saw a message indicating an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network,” which advised them to “please try again in a few minutes.”
The incident’s severity was highlighted when Down Detector, a popular website that monitors online outages, was itself temporarily knocked offline by the technical problems. Once accessible, its tracking data showed a dramatic spike in reported issues.
Cloudflare acknowledged the problem in a status update, stating it was “investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.” Approximately 20 minutes after the initial disruption, the company reported that services had begun to recover, though it warned that “customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates” as mitigation efforts continued.
The outage underscores the critical role Cloudflare plays in the modern internet, with its network underpinning and securing a significant number of websites and applications.